From the Archives: Frank Graham’s ‘Of Dreams and Dread’

Editor’s Note: Frank Graham was Audubon magazine’s field editor for 45 years, during which time he skillfully captured the beauty and complexity of subjects from across the natural world. This feature, a favorite, was first published in the November 1982 issue.

I’m a deep sleeper, not likely to be roused by sharp little creaks or clangs of the dark that seem to fracture a night’s rest for others. But some quality of insistence, part physical, part the stuff of dreams, may get to me after midnight. No other sound consistently reaches so far down into my sleep and brings me back to the moment as the hoarse, repetitive notes that filter through—from 10 miles away—where there is a faint breeze from the southwest and the fog horn sounds at the Petit Manan Lighthouse.

A foghorn, like a gull’s cry and the thunder that waves make on a distant beach, is the music of the sea for most of us with a romantic turn of mind. The true mariner, of course, goes beyond those marks of the littoral into the ocean’s heart. There, one’s ship is the source of nearly all sound. A ship snatches remote voices from the air and its wires, and serves as a sounding board for wind and waves. But a foghorn speaks of the menace that lies at the edge of land, calling up thoughts of heroism or penetrating the night to disturb our dreams.

The most ardent admirer of wild nature is unlikely to talk of loving fog, as he might love sunshine or snow. Fog is too flimsy a stuff, too like nothing, though it functions with all the solidity of a veil and leaves on whatever it touches a thin smear of moisture that is its substance. It is, as a scientist writes, “a great swarm like assemblage in the surface air of hundreds of thousands of droplets per cubic inch so minute that it would take seven billion of them to make a teaspoon full of water.” But in what it clothes, and in what it reveals, fog transforms our world, gilds it in gray, makes the poet in each of us wonder again at the variety of masks that nature puts on and off to enchant us.

It was in fog that I first saw the part of Maine’s coast where I have made my home for more than a quarter-century—fog was part of the enchantment that caught and held me. We drove down a peninsula on a narrow dirt road along which the spruces dripped with old-man's-beard lichen and moisture pilfered from the dense vapor. The landscape was ghostly, and the drive seemed endless. At last our prospective landlords stopped at a small cove and we got out and stood there looking into the fog.

It had receded somewhat, baring an indeterminate stretch of mudflat. There was no water in sight, but we were assured it was out there someplace in the murk. The stillness was profound. No leaf rustled, no bird cried. We stared at the shrouded seascape, as if it held some exalting and momentous revelation. For the moment it made us no overture the sea and the fog were not ready to grant these newcomers their blessing.

But as we chatted on the shore, unwilling to commit to this new place, the elements conspired to force our hand. A breeze came up, stirring and tearing the fog, and the water came into view a long way out across the mud. It was simply a glint at first, like a puddle creeping under a door. Then it gained substance. We became aware of an impending event outside our previous experience. The breeze was out of the south, and it seemed to push the water ahead of it under the fog, urging it nearer, amplifying the sense of primal movement with a low, soughing that sounded like a thousand people whispering. “chrysalises.”

The sea’s sudden appearance out of the fog, its surface agitated by the light wind, gave it an extraordinary illusion of velocity. That it was two hours or more before the tide finally pushed its foaming front edge up the narrow sand beach where we stood did not alter that impression. It was a time in my life when I was opening myself as never before to the various experiences of the natural world. To dwell in its active presence was to nourish one’s sense of being alive. Here the inexorable rhythm of the tides combined with that vaporous broth, the fog, to make manifest the force of sun and moon and earth’s endless spinning on this wild coast. It was a recurring drama I would find hard to leave behind.

Much has changed since my first day on this coast, but not the tides and fogs. A hasty glance at the tide chart tells me when the sea comes and goes, though the fog keeps to no timetable (a statement a visitor might not accept in July, when our planned outings are canceled morning after morning as the fog closes in). But often by day I can see a thick fogbank hovering just offshore. As it begins to move up the bay, one island after another is doused like a flame under an old-fashioned candle-snuffer, and soon the murk is all around me, with the trees dripping. If I can hear the horn at Petit Manan, the atmosphere seems denser still.

There has been a lighthouse on Petit Manan, a treeless island of nine acres, since 1817. It was built by the federal government to mark a treacherous reef that runs to the island from a point of the same name a couple miles away. Apparently the original tower was a sorry affair, already crumbling when a government inspector stopped there 14 years later. The lightkeeper’s dwelling was leaking badly, and the dispirited keeper had long since fled to the mainland. The fellow’s wife, built of sterner stuff, had taken over for him.

In due course, a more reliable keeper was found. (The poor wife, citing experience, applied for the job after her husband’s death, but, predictably, was turned down by the male authorities.) And in 1855 a new granite lighthouse went up. Although the tower was 119 feet high, one of the tallest on the Atlantic Coast, it was recognized that a warning light alone was not enough to keep a passing ship off the rocks. How could mariners be alerted in this dense fog?

E. Price Edwards, a historian of British lighthouses writing over a century ago, mentioned his own country’s attempts to grapple with the problem: “It is proper, however, to observe that the lighthouse authorities in the United States took up the matter practically before it engaged much consideration in this country, owing to the East Coast of America being in an exceptional degree liable to visitation of fog, by which the coasting traffic was seriously inconvenienced; and the necessity arose for something to be done whereby the difficulty might be obviated. The ready genius of the country was not long in coming to conclusions, and although some kind of sound signals, such as bells, gongs, etc., were employed in Europe, the Americans first brought into use Brobdingnagian trumpets, whistles, etc.”

So even before the disintegrating tower came down at Petit Manan Island, the government installed one of the newfangled fog signal bells there. Edward Rowe Snow, in The Lighthouses of New England, had described the next step in the struggle against the hazards of fog in our area, which was the placing of a foghorn at the lighthouse in 1869: “The water supply for the fog steam signal created quite a problem, however, for a nearby swamp was found to contain too much vegetable matter. Finally the old keeper’s dwelling was roofed over and fitted with gutters, which carried rain water into two wooden tanks in the cellar. Pipes ran from the cellar to the fog signal station and the water problem was solved.”

The electrical age brought refinements to the signals. At last, technology made even lighthouse keepers obsolete. They were taken off Petit Manan in 1972, and the station became fully automated. Now machines are in charge, keeping the light flashing and sending the recurrent deep moan out through the gloom.

In summer the island is a welter of stench and shriek—the result of one of the last a few large tern colonies surviving on the Maine coast. Fog shows its baleful aspect then. Herring gulls, which nest just across a narrow bar on Green Island, ordinarily forage for miles around during the day but may change their habits when the fog rolls in. Then, like yachtsmen or bathers, they tend to wait it out. They concentrate on the nesting terns conveniently close at hand, gliding in on their nests in the poor visibility, and there is a rise in the predation of eggs and chicks.

But on the mainland, summer fogs bring unexpected pleasures to stay-at-home humans. Wild-flowers, their colors sometimes bleached out under a bright sun, acquire an extraordinary luminosity against the pallid backdrop. Birdsong takes on a haunting quality missing on fine days. The flutelike notes of the hermit thrush, exquisite under any conditions, seem to come from another world as day fades into dusk or mist, and we hear again the chant that Whitman recalled in another kind of gloom in “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d“:

Sing on sing on you gray-brown bird,

Sing from the swamps, the recesses, pour your chant from the bushes,

Limitless out of the dusk, out of the cedars and pines.

Still, if I had one bird to choose as the voice of the fog in the northern forest, it would be the white-throated sparrow. Friends of mine on the coast who knew the dreamy song, but not the name of the singer always called it “the Beethoven bird.” After listening to it as it sang in the alders one foggy June evening, I hesitated to tell them its real name for fear of breaking a fragile spell.

We think of fog as a veil, hiding or distorting reality. But when I walk out into a morning when all the world beyond the nearest meadow is blotted out, I find another world brought into focus right at my feet. In June every bush glistens with the layered webs of the bowl and doily spiders, convex meshes suspended between twigs with another broad horizontal web below, like that stretched for a high-wire artist. As summer matures, the droplets of fog touch up in astonishing detail other webs that go all but unnoticed in bright sunlight—the orbs of the garden spider, the jewel-studded nets of the hackle-band weavers enclosing the tips of goldenrod, and the bright rectangles of gossamer in the grass that betray the funnel weavers. The baubles hung on each strand seem to draw the menace from them, and perhaps they do. Are flying insects warned away by this radiance?

Let the field entomologist answer handle that question. The one that begs to be answered here is, What is fog? For the poet Carl Sandburg it was simply something that “comes on little cat feet.” For the etymologist, it is a word of obscure origin that apparently drifted into modern English from the Scandinavian mists. For the meteorologist, it is vapor that restricts visibility in any direction to less than one kilometer. And for the curious of every persuasion, it is a cloud that hugs the ground.

“Whenever the air is cooled, by any means whatever, below its dew point, a portion of the water vapor present separates out on such dust particles or other condensation nuclei as happen to be present,” wrote the meteorologist W.J. Humphries in his book Fog and Clouds. “If this process occurs only at a considerable distance above the surface of the earth, leaving the lower clear, the result is some form of cloud. If, on the other hand, it extends quite to, or occurs at, the surface of the earth, it is then called a fog, no matter how shallow or how deep it may be. The distinction, therefore, between fog and cloud is that of position. Fog is a cloud on the earth; a cloud, a fog in the sky.”

Along the Maine coast fog has remained part of the lives of people in the fishing villages, as well as those of summer visitors. Samuel Eliott Morison, the well-known historian of the sea, recalled his boyhood vacation trips to Mount Desert island in the 1890s aboard the old steamboat City of Richmond. In his little book The Story of Mount Desert Island, Morison wrote: “She was owned by her skipper, Captain Charles Deering, who carried no insurance and in a thick fog was wont to anchor, while his competitors felt their way along by listening to sheep blatting on the rocky islands, or by the echoes of their own steam whistles. On one occasion, when the city of Richmond had anchored for a long time, a passenger inquired of Captain Deering, ‘Aren't you going on?’ ‘Nope.’ ‘Why not? It's all clear overhead.’ ‘We're not bound that way!’

I still think back on scenes of the recent past with a fogbank as the backdrop. Late at night, when the mist closed in quickly, a number of hardy souls were out on the mudflats at low tide, digging marine worms for the sport-fishing market. Suddenly the little cove where they parked their old cars came alive in a glow of headlights and blaring of auto horns: One of their colleagues had not returned. Almost simultaneously, lights went on in the windows of shoreline camps where summer visitors were trying to sleep, and there came angry cries of “Quiet!” But the wormers in the cove kept honking horns and blinking lights until their tardy friend, guided by the uproar, came trudging out of the fog, only minutes ahead of the incoming tide, his buckets filled with a pink and pulpy mess of bloodworms.

Although the crafters of thrillers usually leave us with the impression that fog is the enemy of virtue, cloaking only the most mischievous affairs, history shows that heroes, too, have sometimes made good use of dense cover. It is said that General George Washington escaped complete disaster and a sudden end to the colonists hopes by spiriting his surviving forces out of the British army's clutches under cover of fog after the Battle of Long Island in 1776. Napoleon also lived to fight another day when he eluded a British fleet in fog and returned to France from Egypt in 1799.

But it must be admitted that fog is more likely to upset than abet human plans. Here a comparison with birds may be instructive. Birds, especially during the early stages of their migrations, tend to land if they fly into thick fog. Those that continue often come to grief, and there are reports of various species, notably ducks, crashing into buildings, trees, and wires. Arthur Cleveland Bent, in his Life Histories of North American Gallinaceous Birds, quoted an observer of one of the many catastrophes to which the passenger pigeon was polarized in the late 19th century, this time in Michigan: “On one occasion, an immense flock of young birds became bewildered in a fog while crossing Crooked Lake and, descending, struck the water and perished by the thousands. The shore for miles was covered a foot or more deep with them. The old birds rose above the fog and none were killed.”

Fog is said to kill and injure more humans (indirectly) than does any other meteorological hazard. A sampling of recent newspaper clippings suggests the harm to people and property:

Scattered fog caused a 118-car chain-reaction accident on a major West German autobahn that injured 19 people, five of them critically.

When thousands of passengers stampeded onto a fog-shrouded ferry in Shanghai, China, 11 were killed and 76 injured.

A speeding bus plowed into mourners in a funeral procession at a village 450 miles south of Cairo, Egypt, 13 people were killed and nine injured in the accident, which occurred in a heavy fog.

Powerful stuff, fog. The stuff of life and death; of dreams and melodrama, great pictures and poetry. Shakespeare, the arch-poet who transformed our language and sometimes prefigured our history, drenched Macbeth in fog. In the play’s very opening, the three witches chant, Fair is foul, and foul is fair/Hover through the fog and filthy air.

England later seemed to fill up with “the fog and filthy air,” toward which the British came to have a proprietary feeling, especially when it descended on their capital. There it was called, in the spirit of Cockney humor, “a London particular,” emphasizing its uniqueness among others of its kind. In Dickens's Bleak House, Esther Summerson arrived in London and found the streets so full of dense, brown smoke that she asked if there was a great fire somewhere. “O dear no, miss,” she was told. “This is a London particular, a fog, miss.”

Fog, as a manifestation of a certain kind of light, has been important to painters and absolutely vital to writers and moviemakers who deal in thrills or horror. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, one of the founders of the modern arm of the trade, could take a villainous character and a wisp of fog, throw in a blood-curdling shriek, and whip up a deliciously poisonous stew. Even today, The Hound of the Baskervilles remains steeped in terror:

“Over the great Grimpen Mire there hung a dense, white fog. It was drifting slowly in our direction and banked itself up like a wall on that side of us, low but thick and well defined. The moon shone on it, and it looked like a great shimmering ice-field with the heads of the distant tors as rocks boring upon its surface. Holmes's face was turned towards it, and he muttered impatiently as he watched its sluggish drift.”

With good reason did the incomparable detective mutter in vexation and, a moment later, cry out in alarm. Never was a fog so sinister and murderous! In it lurked that “hound of hell” that threatened to upset all of Holmes's well-laid plans and bring doom to still another Baskerville. But it was a benignant fog, too—confounding at last the wretch Stapleton and sending him to his just deserts in the dreadful ooze of the Grimpen Mire.

And so at night the earth often works its alchemy. The darkening sky closes in, the land and water seem to exhale their vaporous breath, and a foghorn sounds through the deepening gloom. Then scientists give way to poets and dreamers.